Single women have changed the way we think about politics, culture and even the institution of marriage.
Photograph: Blend Images/Alamy

There’s a special kind of disdain in American culture reserved for unmarried women. Men are bachelors – a word that conjures up images of a pre-Amal George Clooney – while women are old maids and spinsters. Unmarried men are free; unmarried women are desperate. And if you’re a single woman who has a child ... well, you are singlehandedly bringing about the downfall of civilization.

Just this week, a new bill in Illinois was proposed that would ban a mother from receiving state aid unless a father is named on her child’s birth certificate. If the mother cannot or doesn’t want to name the father, “either a father must be conclusively established by DNA evidence or, within 30 days after birth, another family member who will financially provide for the child must be named.” Ohio tried something similar in 2009, when a Republican legislator tried to pass a bill that wouldn’t allow a woman to obtain an abortion unless she could name and notify the father of the fetus. (It was the second time Rep John Adams tried this kind of legislation; luckily it went nowhere.)

It seems we’re not very interested in single women unless we’re finding new ways to police their reproductive rights and life decisions. We’re upset that they’re not married, even more so if they dare undertake parenthood without a man. We’re obsessed with their sexual exploits but diminish their political power with cutesy labels like “Sex and the City voters” or “Beyoncé voters”.

According to a new book, however, those who dismiss unmarried women – or aim to punish them like the Illinois bill does – do so at their own peril. Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of An Independent Nation, out next week, documents not only how the increase of single women is shifting American politics and culture right now, but how unmarried women have always been a central part of our country’s development. And at a moment when single women as a voting bloc are more important than ever before, it would do well for those who disdain single women as a demographic to pay closer attention.

Traister, a writer for New York magazine and author of the 2008 book Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, details in her new book the impressive history of single women, from Louisa May Alcott and black feminist thought in the 1930s to modern female friendships and Oprah Winfrey. Traister also examines the unfortunate history of mostly conservative men who blast single women, whether George W Bush and his marriage promotion programs or a Wisconsin Republican who wanted to pass a bill that cited single parenthood as a factor in child abuse.

But as Traister points out in a newly released excerpt, all that hating has not amounted to more women getting married: single women now outnumber married women, and only 20% of Americans are married before age 30, a 40% drop since 1960. And while this rise of single women hasn’t brought down society yet, it has meant tremendous change, the sort that shows the clout that unmarried (but not necessarily uncoupled) women have quietly accumulated.

“The practicalities of female life independent of marriage give rise to demands for pay equity, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, universal pre-K, lowered college costs, more affordable healthcare and broadly accessible reproductive rights,” Traister writes. (All of which, I suppose, must feel like the end of society to some conservatives.)

Single women have changed the way we think about politics, culture and even the institution of marriage. And now, as the election looms closer, the fate of the country could very well be in their hands – almost quarter of votes in the last presidential election, Traister writes, were made by unmarried women. So perhaps instead of creating laws to limit the ways that single women can have children (or not), or wrongly deriding those without spouses as aberrations or cultural dangers, we should start treating single women with the power that they deserve – and the power they have.